Joanna Walsh - Hotel

The corridor

Is next to everything is an inconvenience in which all doors are identical in which the floor which normally recedes dominates in which there is carpet on the walls sometimes the ceiling even in which there are no windows out of which it is difficult to get into somewhere else although this is its function in which elevator doors snap to and fire-escape fire doors are airtight in which each corridor on each floor is identical which has to provide maps and the floor number by the elevator to avoid confusion in which there are sometimes amenities which are also landmarks the ice machine the fire extinguisher the chip in the paintwork and (there used to be) the elevated ashtray.

The door (key)

When Dora stays by the lake, her father stays in a hotel but she stays in Herr K’s home. She does not have a key. In Dora’s home the dining room is locked. At home, Dora’s brother is locked in his bedroom, which is on the other side of the dining room. At Dora’s home, the larder is also locked, and Dora must ask her mother for the key. In Herr K’s house nothing is locked. She does not have the key in Herr K’s house, but instead of being unable to unlock, she is unable to lock. Herr K has the keys.

In my hotel, I have the key, but so does housekeeping. Someone can always get in when I am not around, or even when I am. Nevertheless, I lock the door at night. When I am home, but not with you, I lock the door, and put the chain across, which I do not do when you are there.

DORA

There might be a mishap during the night.

At home there are no internal locks. Why would there be?

FREUD

The case has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks. 4

I have lived in relation to desires, often other people’s. It is easy to slot desire in. There is a hole in my side into which someone else’s desires fit. It’s only a matter of finding the right key, a key to the code, which is made of words. I must not want the key always to be a man.

FREUD

No one who disdains the key can ever unlock the door.

In the hotel, the key is a card. It looks just like a regular credit card and acts that way too. You slip it into the slot beside the door until the light goes green. The hotel reads the code, and you’re in.

The bedroom

How soon do I unpack, admit this space is home?

There are so many things I could do here that I could also do at home, but I do not use the gadgets, which resemble, but are unlike, those I have at home: the flip-down ironing board, the trouser press, the hairdryer on its long air-duct tube that will only work with the pressure of a cocked thumb, the mini-bar. These things set me against the hotel authorities. I could put my own champagne in the fridge, but it wouldn’t fit. Everything reminds me: the hotel is not on my side, not really.

The hotel suspects even me of wanting to steal its coat hangers (quite rightly). The hangers are rings threaded onto a steel bar, with wooden shoulders hooked on below. Oh they are strange, like people who lose their heads, who fall apart too easy. What would be the use of them, outside this place? They all have a screw loose.

I thread my clothes on, obedient.

My dress hangs alone in the wardrobe, the shape of a woman with no one inside, no head, no legs. Even if it had legs its feet wouldn’t touch the floor. I take it down. I wake up, my clothes on the floor, or tangled in the sheets’ whiteness. Wear colored underwear; it’ll be easier to find after. Whatever the decor, the sheets are always the color of erasure.

Some hotels are decorated entirely in white. I stayed in one once, in a white city. It was a white box.

THE WHITE HOTEL

The white room is dedicated to a sense of well being, providing fresh white products. The terrasse concepts have a private roof-top outdoor terrace with its own jacuzzi.

In the white hotel I stay in a room on an upper floor. It is square, and everything in it is white. The square bed is high, like a bed in a hospital, high enough to need square block steps leading up to it.

The square French doors lead out onto a small right-angled balcony. The room also has smaller, square, double-glazed windows that don’t open. The microwaved supper arrives in a square white bowl.

THE WHITE HOTEL

The room is white hence the name of the concept. The bed looks like a table. The bathtub looks like a canopy with a plexiglas “bath sky dome.”

Below in the courtyard, square white umbrellas.

Because the sun gets very white here too.

The white hides the hotel’s sharp corners.

FREUD

The two families had rented a floor in the hotel together, and one day Frau K had announced that she could not keep the bedroom which she been sharing up to that point with one of her children, and a few days later Dora’s father gave up his bedroom and they both moved into new rooms, the end rooms which were separated only by the corridor.

At one time Dora had slept in Frau K’s bedroom.

Frau K is white. Frau K is ideal. Except she is not.

Frau K is not liked by her husband.

Frau K is liked by Dora’s father.

HERR K

You know I get nothing from my wife.

DORA’S FATHER

I get nothing out of my own wife.

Dora’s father gives Frau K something. He gives Dora, Frau K, and his wife jewelry that is alike, but he does not like white jewelry. He does not like his wife’s pearls. He substitutes a bracelet.

DORA

Mama. got a lot of it from papa.

Herr K likes Dora.

Herr K, says Freud, is like Dora’s father.

Dora, says Freud, thinks Freud is like Herr K.

Dora is nothing like her mother, so she says.

(Freud never doubts her on this one.)

Dora’s father is impotent.

Frau K asks her husband to give her nothing.

Nothing happens in Frau K.

Dora thinks she is ideal.

THE WHITE HOTEL

The room becomes a structure for welcoming micro-events in relation to the concept of space. In this way, comfort goes beyond mere physical or visual comfort. This is comfort at work, produced by the generosity and simplicity of the structures which, like operating instructions, invite us to take advantage of the present moment. These spaces are based on an openness of volumes, a non-specialisation of structures. This has the effect of smoothing the transition from one activity to another and of sharing one’s [sic] experiences.

Sic.

All sic.

Where is marriage?

In what white room furnished.

Where were the white flowers?

With its own presents.

Does the hotel stay in us?

Can I cure myself of home here?

Dreamwork

I came to the hotel with a kind of tiredness I can’t sleep away. Is it from being on these toes, tipped forward all day in hotel heels? When I am asleep, I am still paying (or working) for my hotel though I am not making the most of it. Or perhaps I am.

FREUD

Every dream is a desire represented as fulfilled. Only unconscious desires, or those that extend into the unconscious, have the power to form a dream.

I don’t remember any of the dreams I’ve had in hotels.

The en-suite

Is all angles, and the angles reflect, white: the tiles, the corner of the shower head, unexpected. Me?

Yes you are, but what am I?

In the mirror, I don’t see myself, perhaps because I’m not at home here. In the en-suite of a railway compartment, Freud failed to recognize himself.

FREUD

A more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and a travelling cap came in. 5

It was himself of course. But Freud didn’t want to travel in a train that would have someone like him for a member.